When I ordered the ASRock H67M-ITX/HT the Z68 was out of stock at Newegg. The H67 was DOA so I RMA'd back to egg and ordered the Z68 cause it was back in stock and I was a little afraid seeing how many of the H67 were DOA according to the reviews. As soon as I ordered the Z68 they went out of stock. The H67 seem like a good enough board or a HTPC if you are willing to take a chance on a DOA.

When I ordered the ASRock H67M-ITX/HT the Z68 was out of stock at Newegg. The H67 was DOA so I RMA'd back to egg and ordered the Z68 cause it was back in stock and I was a little afraid seeing how many of the H67 were DOA according to the reviews. As soon as I ordered the Z68 they went out of stock. The H67 seem like a good enough board or a HTPC if you are willing to take a chance on a DOA.

DRB

It seems in general, the mini-ITX H61/67/etc. boards are getting harder to find. I wonder if they're not making them any longer because the *77 boards are coming out.

I just got one of the Intel DH77DF boards, and so far I'm very happy with it. It's not really missing anything except for built-in wifi, but that could be added with the mini-pcie connector it has on-board. It even has Firewire (rear port and second header on the board), which is amazingly hard to come by on mini-itx these days! Intel ethernet chip too which is nice. The power connector is kinda poorly placed for my current Morex case (fan is right up against it), but I was planning on getting a Wesena case soon anyway... The whole thing with G530 cpu only uses about 25W when streaming Netflix (4GB ram, one SSD drive).

It seems in general, the mini-ITX H61/67/etc. boards are getting harder to find. I wonder if they're not making them any longer because the *77 boards are coming out.

I think this may be the case. My friend has an older PC and one of his RAM slots on the mobo died, so we were looking for a new one and we had trouble finding just a standard ATX one, impossible to find one that could support dual SLI graphic cards. They are all micro-ATX now.

So our other option was replacing his 4x1 gig RAM sticks, which was now 3 thanks to the dead slot, with 2x2 gig RAM sticks. The cheapest DDR2 800 mHz memory he found was $50-$60! He didn't want to upgrade his entire system but it's crazy how some inferior products are more expensive now than the latest and greatest.

I really like the specs on the ASRock Z68M-ITX/HT, plus it came with a remote which, when added to the cost of a H61 or H67 board made it close in price (plus I prefer the Z68 chipset). Only other Z68 ITX motherboards I can find locally are Zotac, but they're quite expensive.

Unfortunately the Z77 ITX boards haven't made it down to Australia yet. Given it's for a bedroom PC, a H61 board would probably be more than enough anyway.

Yup.

I have a few of the H61's from Asrock and they are quite good.

I plan to get a Z68 or Z77 next though... since I have some 1600mhz RIPJAWZ I want to use to full speed.

Z68 is faster than H61 mainly because of the memory clock speed.

1600mhz > 1066mhz.

For HTPC you won't notice much difference. I have that same CPU in a Asrock H61 USB3.0 Sata 6G board and it works great.

Z68 certainly has nice features over H61- but its a $20 premium. I doubt you need the RAID, the faster memory clock , the overlocking headroom, or any of the other stuff.

H61 is fine for HTPC.

I have a Z68 for my main machine on i7. It's really not a big deal. I use the G630 with H61 all the time and barely notice any difference. (well there is a difference, but the H61 is still surprisingly excellent)

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"Too much is almost enough. Anything in life worth doing is worth overdoing. Moderation is for cowards."